11 ms·

Apple knows 5G is about infrastructure, not mobile phones (2018)

112 points by evo_9 8y ago

tlrobinson 8y ago
(2018)
- skilled 8y ago
  It's over. What about it?
  - X-Istence 8y ago
    This article was posted November 21st, 2018. The grandparent was simply noting that the article should be tagged with the year because it is no longer current.
  - NullPrefix 8y ago
    Articles from previous years are postfixed with (year)
    - skilled 8y ago
      That's the joke...
mr_toad 8y ago
> But sometimes writers looking for a story don’t fully understand what they are talking about Or they’re just talking about what their audience wants to hear. Without actually making a story up. Usually.
jimtaguchi 8y ago
Just to get this out of the way, I see Apple shares currently presenting a huge buying opportunity. A good Christmas quarter will regain that lost 20 percent, and I don’t see any reason why Apple shouldn’t have a good Christmas quarter. Yikes...
- drumhead 8y ago
  Yes, that comment was a not well timed at all.
  - jeklj 8y ago
    Prognostication has never been Cringely’s strong suit.
  - winrid 8y ago
    It really was. Impressive.
  - ianai 8y ago
    Prediction is at best a fools game. I wish people were more forgiving. Just, of course, be extra careful when predictions involve your money.
    - rictic 8y ago
      If predictors state their confidence and make falsifiable predictions then they can be fairly graded and compared. This is especially true when many other people are also making predictions about the same event. Cringely is the stereotype of the pundit who makes a lot of really confident predictions that are just absurdly, comically wrong, over and over and over. But he's fun to read, so he gets read. Same as the analysts that you see on the news.
      - beatgammit 8y ago
        I love watching Jim Cramer, but I never take his stock picks. I like his analysis and use it as a representation of the majority of household investors looking at the short term. I find that entertaining, and I like watching the movement of stocks after his analysis. However, when I make my own investments, I do more thorough that watching a guy make quick-fire guesses.
- ununoctium87 8y ago
  That remark aged really well...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
skunkworker 8y ago
For me personally the jump from 4g(LTE) to 5G is much less apparent than from 3G to 4G. It's not unlike the upgrades in video technology. 2G -> 3G -> 4G -> 5G VHS -> DVD -> Bluray -> UHD While the jump is significant between each level, the apparent improvements are diminishing. On LTE I can watch Netflix, live tv, Facetime, use the internet as I would at home on Wifi. Using the internet on the go (mobile) won't see that much of an apparent improvement (unless you are needing high bandwidth connectivity), but I could definitely see a case if this was used to push gigabit level wireless speeds in hard to install/dense residential locations.
- DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
  I think the biggest change won’t be the faster speeds that 5G will deliver; but that it will necessarily mean the carriers will have to significantly raise their bandwidth limits beyond the current 1-10GB/mo limits (even “Unlimited” plans have soft caps and speed limits). Kinda like how 3G meant iMessage, Skype and Hangouts rendered SMS obsolete so carriers stopped charging per-message - I think 5G will mean more people will stream other video streaming services (this skirting the controversy over zero-rating Netflix and YouTube to the detriment of their competitors). Hopefully this will also mean that people in underserved rural areas stuck on atrociously slow DSL can get decent service without needing to compromise with a high-latency satellite connection or a low-transfer-limit LTE hotspot.
  - perlpimp 8y ago
    Herein lies the question, if we actually prefer to text instead of vid/facetime/etc how this would be relevant. Streaming applications from powerful server might be a thing though.
- londons_explore 8y ago
  Live streaming apps from the cloud rather than running them locally on the device suddenly becomes practical when you have reliable low latency connections. That in turn means apps can be faster because they're running on a cluster of powerful machines with a big GPU. Developers will look back at the old times when apps had to be unloaded to save memory, and then try to recover state when reopened.
desireco42 8y ago
Apple doesn't know sh*t lately. Projecting expertise and mystical knowledge worked when Steve Jobs were there, even if you were wrong, at least this guy had great vision in front of him, so it made sense to assume he sees more and better. Today, that is no longer the case. 5G has quite a few hurdles ahead of them, it is already overhyped and it might not deliver.
- zapzupnz 8y ago
  Could you elaborate on your comment? I don't see how your assertion about Jobs (which I personally find tiresome: he's been dead a long while but the company continues to thrive; it's now necessary to start qualifying this argument about Jobs' absence rather than assume it is the argument) ties in with the details of the article. Perhaps you could expand on what you see as 5G's hurdles and how they specifically relate to Apple's product plans.
  - wkearney99 8y ago
    Is it really 'thriving if it's just operating by feeding off the carcass of what Jobs forced into existence or only trivially evolving it? Innovation and bringing that to market has been sorely lacking from apple of late.
    - prewett 8y ago
      If by "not innovating" you mean "not introducing new product-categories" then, yes, Apple isn't innovating. However, in the past few years Apple has: - made fingerprint scanning fast and easy to use (and then removed it) - pioneered facial recognition that is robust against being fooled by images and masks, and also robust to the user's face slowly changing (e.g. growing a beard) - created their own SoC that allows for solid security, excellent power management, and fast graphics - made security a feature - pioneered augmented reality with ARKit - pioneered watch-based EKG - pioneered watch-based insulin measurements (apparently the research didn't work out, though) - researching self-driving cars (rumor has it) - pioneered fake bokeh with a phone camera - maintains net profit margins of 40% (!! even Coca-Cola is only around 30%; margins of this sort are not easy to maintain for multiple years) You could argue that Apple is not the first to do many of those, but it wasn't the first to make a phone-computer, nor was it the first to make watch-computer, yet that counted as innovating. So I don't think it would be fair to say that security, SoC, AR, self-driving cars (allegedly) is not innovating. It's just that the innovations aren't category-defining like they used to be. But category-defining innovations aren't a dime a dozen. And we don't know if Steve Jobs could have continued creating category-defining products, either.
chowells 8y ago
Wow. There's some truth in there, but a lot of nonsense. Especially in the analogies. If you can't see the difference between 60Hz and 144Hz when a small object (mouse pointer) is moving quickly against a static background, you're not paying attention. And 144Hz is amazingly far short of the actual perceptual limit in that case. Consider the difference between what it looks like to move your fingertip around and move a mouse pointer around at high speed. I haven't done tests to measure, but I'd be surprised if I mistook a 500Hz sampling rate for continuous movement. This is all because there are edge cases for which your brain can make use of significantly more information than it can directly identify. Just because a pixel has a smaller arc than your retina can distinguish doesn't mean that its contribution to the image isn't recognized. "Retina" screens are still far below the level at which there would stop being advantages to increasing resolution. (Yes, there would be huge disadvantages too, and I'm not saying we need higher resolutions.) What are the odds that there are edge cases where the extra bandwidth of 5G would actually matter? Seems pretty close to 100% to me. Some of those edge cases might be as easy to find as moving your mouse pointer rapidly. Maybe going to a sporting event?
- snazz 8y ago
  I do wonder what the limit is in visual “framerate”. Normal light seems very smooth, but I can easily pick up on individual “frames” if I wave my finger under an older fluorescent light (which should be running at 50-60Hz to match mains power if I understand it correctly).
  - baroffoos 8y ago
    The eyes don't have a framerate. A video at 60fps looks smooth but a single black frame on a white video is visible even at much higher fps. If I move my mouse quickly in circles on a 60fpx screen it looks like I have 10 individual cursors in a ring but if I move my finger quickly in circles it looks like I have a slightly transparent ring shaped finger with no gaps in between, I can see the smooth curve of the path that my finger took which would have to be captured at an incredibly high framerate to display on a monitor.
    - 8y ago
hellofunk 8y ago
I read an article a couple of months ago where numerous scientists signed a letter proclaiming significant health risks to ubiquitous 5G in society, that the waves are apparently quite dangerous to health? Anyone know anything about that? I think this was it: https://www.saferemr.com/2017/09/5G-moratorium12.html https://www.saferemr.com/2017/09/5G-moratorium12.html
- zw123456 8y ago
  One of the primary premises of cellular technology is Frequency re-use (time division is as well, combined called OFDMA) but just in terms of Freq re-use, if you want to increase the capacity of a cellular system then you want to reduce the size of a cell site. The way this is done is by reducing the power level (also lowering the elevation of antennas). When you reduce the power level then adjacent cell sites can re-use the same frequencies without interfering with each other. When people hear about 5G where plans call for 300 meter cell spacing, they panic thinking that the power levels will increase, but in reality it does not. Because the transmitter power levels are reduced commensurately. A lot of people (even scientists) do not understand this basic concept. Current spacing and power levels are 2Km at 40Watts (typical but varies) in an urban area for low and mid band (1ghz - 3ghz). If you reduce the spacing to 300M and 5W, then you really have not changed the energy density. But what you accomplish is getting more capacity by enabling more re-use of frequency spectrum. The numbers are different for different bands due to different propagation properties, but that is the basic concept.
  - hellofunk 8y ago
    I was referring to this: https://www.saferemr.com/2017/09/5G-moratorium12.html https://www.saferemr.com/2017/09/5G-moratorium12.html The concerns seemed legit, I wonder why the industry is either not paying attention to them, or not at least responding to the concerns
    - Junk_Collector 8y ago
      People respond to these concerns constantly. This was the same group against, 2G, 3G, 4G, wireless power meters, etc. In fact, The response from the DIRECTORATE-GENERAL HEALTH AND FOOD SAFETY of the European Union was linked on the site. Of course, the SaferEMR folks dismiss it and all of the safety testing and health risk studies that have been done. Their official stance is that we haven't demonstrated that there couldn't be some unknown mechanism by which EMR could negatively impact human health so we should curtail all wireless technology until we have proven that there is no possible down side. This is of course impossible.
United857 8y ago
The author isn't thinking ahead enough. We might be reaching human perceptual limits for rectilinear 2-D displays -- but what about stereoscopic, 360, lightfields, ...? There's plenty of future formats for content that will drive bandwidth and resolution improvements for a long time to come.
- MrKristopher 8y ago
  That all comes out in 2019?
  - baroffoos 8y ago
    VR has been out for ages and is fairly limited by the current available tech.
  - stuntkite 8y ago
    I have a streaming volumetric video chat prototype. I plan on launching private beta this month. I also have a portable hardware display that I guess you could call a phone that I'm working on. I expect it to be testing with a small group by Q2. I'm petty excited about 2019. 5G makes things a lot easier and really increases how people can interact with the content. Just for reference, streaming point cloud is about 100mb/sec. You can compress "frames" with the totally unproven Google Draco product, but there's nothing quite like mpeg for the format. I guess it's really hard to call it a format since there's no real standard at current.
Nokinside 8y ago
5G home routers will come before first. It's seems that the plan is to get early adopters to replace cable. https://www.verizonwireless.com/5g/home/ https://www.verizonwireless.com/5g/home/
- baroffoos 8y ago
  I can see it happening in Australia where the internet is universally shit unless you are in the lucky 1% of areas. My office is in the center of the city and has 10Mbit/s down. We would easily be in range of any future 5g infrastructure.
becauseiam 8y ago
Maybe I am biased, but live TV is not going to die completely. News, sport, concerts, lotto results, and other timely things will continue to have demand. IP is a terribly broken and inefficient medium to deliver this to the audience, and the internet as it stands today with what we deliver simply does not have the capacity to survive a "traditional TV switch off". Some broadcasters are testing with deploying onto 5G with various trials, but most appear to be doing an all IP operation, and handing over the controls of deployment from the incumbent transmission networks who charge on site/power and other performance metrics, to telcos who will probably charge both the broadcaster and the end user per packet, as well as introducing more middlemen (CDNs) to further create inefficiencies. There's a lot to work out before Cringely's "utopian" 5G network to rule them all can actually exist.
- bdhess 8y ago
  TV delivered over IP is not the same as TV delivered over the internet. When your ISP is the same entity as your TV carrier, the traffic doesn't have to travel over the internet. Comcast is already doing this with X1 and Verizon is already doing this with Fios.
  - topranks 8y ago
    Yeah exactly. Lots of cable TV networks are all-IP, using multicast to distribute the signal. But the previous post is 100% correct in saying that “video over unicast on the internet” is massively inefficient compared to current broadcast techniques. People want Netflix-style video on demand though. Outside live news & sports that will kill broadcast TV.
    - londons_explore 8y ago
      What seems 'horribly inefficient' today is usually the future. Sending cartoons as raster rather than vector data is also horribly inefficient, yet every TV network does it. Sending music as MP3 is horribly inefficient compared to the original notes in midi form, yet everyone does it. Taking a photograph of your electric meter rather than writing down the number is millions of times more wasteful of space, yet people do it.
gumby 8y ago
What a strange article. The real issue is that 5G in 24–86 GH region has a range of about 1500 m, unlike LTE (and 5G in the LTE bands up to 6 GH) with a much longer range. So think of 5G more as a small-cell mesh technology -- I doubt you'll see it outside urban centers except for marketing -- your "5G" phone will continue to work but only at LTE speeds & bandwidth.
- ianai 8y ago
  Too bad, I was hoping the mesh would mean more bandwidth more places - as the mesh allows much greater signal.
- 1stranger 8y ago
  It's my understanding that 5G will also be used in the 600mhz spectrum at least by T-Mobile so will have the longer range with improved bandwidth and latency of 5G.
  - gumby 8y ago
    I’m afraid at the lower frequencies you’re not going to see much improvement due to the laws of physics.
z3t4 8y ago
i remember a call from someone trying to sell me 3G internet. she had a very hard time understanding why the bandwidth they offered wasn't enough, i already had a fiber connection. its nice to only have to wait a second when downloading packages using apt-get, downloading free OS distributions, container images, training sets, software modules and dependencies, raw images, backups, installing a game from Steam, etc.
niftich 8y ago
I'm not familiar with the author but I agree with their first few points. But I feel there's more to it than that. Apple can afford to hold off on 5G because the networks aren't there, the "5G" term as an industry-sanctioned umbrella for related innovations is firmly in the hype-phase of the hype cycle and its various features are intentionally and unintentionally conflated (both at the origin by industry and along the way by writers and pundits in media), and because Apple is an integrated hardware-software platform distinct from the only other mobile alternative, and is therefore more resilient against a hypothetical consumer exodus over not supporting something no one can yet use anyway. Unlike consumers, some investors may see it differently, but Apple isn't in dire financial straits either. As for use-cases that 5G will enable, industry groups are hopeful for nearly every scenario that involves sending and receiving data. But technical fitness and business models are different questions entirely. And if we're talking about the kinds of hardware Apple currently makes, 5G is to be understood solely in terms of wireless carriers a customer can subscribe to a plan for, not in some intricate use-case for machine-to-machine communication. Unlike a more invested party and component-maker like Qualcomm, Huawei Nokia, or Samsung, their customer base isn't industry at large, but people who want a tablet-like device to carry with them. They can punt this to the next generation of phones or the one after that, they can wait out the network to be built, for the insane number of access points to be deployed, and perhaps even until their feud with Qualcomm winds down, and the state of play (solely in terms of mobile data and its utility for a smartphone) isn't going to be running circles around them for a while.
GuB-42 8y ago
No excuses to Apple. First, 5G is the future, it may not be important at first but it will eventually change. Is a bit of future proofing too much to ask of a high end smartphone? Second, 5G is not just about maximum bandwidth, it also gives you access to less saturated frequencies. The lack of 5G is a very big deal, especially when smartphones vendors struggle to find even minor differentiating factors.
- FPGAhacker 8y ago
  I agree about future-proofing a phone from the consumer point of view, but it would decrease Apple's margins or increase the price of an already really expensive phone for no current benefit. On the technical side, I think 5G has a serious problem of being blocked by just about anything at those frequencies. I'm sure the RF wizards will get it sorted out, but I imagine early adopters are going to suffer with garbage signal indoors.
  - niftich 8y ago
    More on this: upcoming 5G implementation proposals, such as 3GPP's '5G NR', have bands [1] in the UHF, SHF, and EHF range, out of which the EHF/mmWave bands are most susceptible to environmental attenuation, but they're also the ones capable of the highest throughput. The UHF bands are rather similar to LTE, and deliver only a modest improvement. So really, 5G is a somewhat abstract standard by ITU-T that specifies requirements, and the industry then delivers a suite of technologies that are deployed together and marketed as 5G. In the case of 4G, the same was true at first, but then non-confirming LTE was cobbled together as a series of progressive enhancements of existing tech by the industry, and marketed as "4G", co-opting the term in consumers' minds and making the prior formal definition irrelevant. With the hype and anticipation over 5G rapidly intensifying, there's a chance the same might happen again, as networks are eager to brand any progressive enhancement as a true differentiating factor. It's enabled by the term "5G" having cachet with consumers, yet its technical specs are relatively obscure so average customers lack meaningful information and recourse to challenge the marketing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_NR_frequency_bands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_NR_frequency_bands
- 8y ago
jsgo 8y ago
...because this story presumes that 5G support is somehow vital to mobile phones. It isn’t. ... But the important question to ask here is why that speed difference matters for mobile phone users? It doesn’t. 5G is no killer app. ———- Stopped reading at this point. 1) based on quotes from various providers, one big benefit of 5G is in bandwidth. I don’t personally know how (beyond less time to download something opens up bandwidth for other devices quicker), but that’d seem to be a big deal. The whole network saturation issues I hear about (T-Mobile is great in my area and I’ve never experienced throttling issues or the like, but I’ve heard stories). 2) What other killer feature can a phone have at this point? I’ll give credit to phones that flip out into tablet like displays, but I think just about any truly compelling innovation is pretty done in these devices. 3) Anecdote time. I live in a neighborhood where we spent 5 years fighting a provider that maintained an exclusive easement over TV/Internet. This provider’s speed was 10Mbps on a great day and their peak hours were, per their support staff, “between 4pm and 1am” where you were lucky to get Facebook to load (and people sharing pictures/video which seems to be the big use case was a painful experience to be on the receiving end of). Finally, we got out of it and while waiting for Spectrum to lay their infrastructure, I was using T-Mobile’s International Plus add-on as a hotspot for desktop, laptop and TVs and it was fantastic (relative to what we had). Mobile LTE/5G could very easily serve those in similar situations and if infrastructure is in place, rural areas. I’m of the mind that I won’t buy a 5G device until the infrastructure is there so I’m okay with what I read to a point, but it seemed like a case of making a myriad excuses after a point and tired of it quickly.
- dingo_bat 8y ago
  > I’m of the mind that I won’t buy a 5G device until the infrastructure is there so I’m okay with what I read to a point If you want any other innovation (camera, screen, cpu, etc.), you will be forced by Apple to pay for 5G tech too.
signa11 8y ago
fta ''' The whole idea behind 5G is that it will allow the wireless carriers to totally eat the lunches of wireline telephone, cable and Internet service providers while also supplanting broadcast TV. ''' well, most of the wireline operators have a _huge_ presence in the wireless world as well, think at&t, vzw, sprint, vodafone etc. of the world. afaik, 5g has primarily been about better specturm utilization. core-network has not really changed significantly since 3g -> 4g transition (where it i.e. core, became an all ip network). sure, you keep hearing about things like control-plane user-plane separation (cups) etc. but that is just a marginal improvement over what has already been deployed/running...
camillomiller 8y ago
“Just to get this out of the way, I see Apple shares currently presenting a huge buying opportunity. A good Christmas quarter will regain that lost 20 percent, and I don’t see any reason why Apple shouldn’t have a good Christmas quarter.” Ouch
- 3chelon 8y ago
  My exact thought.
joecool1029 8y ago
I'm still looking for whitepapers on 5G. Has a standard even come together yet, or are we mostly just talking about high-band spectrum use that will be stopped by leaves? The carriers are just going to push a software update to change the indicator for LTE-A to 5G, I think AT&T already did that...
- londons_explore 8y ago
  Current tech can't really smoothly move between frequency bands. 5G is promising that. If 90 percent of the phones in a cell can be hoisted up to the 80Ghz spectrum, then the remaining devices can each have a much larger share of the 800Mhz/1.8Ghz spectrum. As the leaves blow about in the wind, devices will dynamically shift bands every few milliseconds.
- Frqy3 8y ago
  Nokia Networks has some good 5G whitepapers and other learning resources. https://networks.nokia.com/5g/resources https://networks.nokia.com/5g/resources
  - joecool1029 8y ago
    Thanks!
- Foivos 8y ago
  A big part of 5G are deployments at sub-6Ghz frequencies. So for this part, you do not have to worry about 5G being short range or easily blocked. Compared to LTE you will still get benefits like flexible numerology (ie. lower latency) and full duplex (ie. increased bandwidth). The name 5G is more of a marketing term rather than an accurate technical description, just like the term "retina display". Different vendors can market the same technology very differently. For example, HSPA was marketed as 3.5G, 3G+, Turbo 3G, 3.7G, 3.9G and even 4G. It did not help that HSPA evolved a bit during its lifetime. I would not be surprised if operators arbitrary decide to call whatever they are using 5G.
  - opencl 8y ago
ninedays 8y ago
Can anyone tell me in which country I can use 5G network as a regular consumer? I don't really understand the author point if there is nowhere I can access this tech. Also, having a 5G network with lots of restriction won't bring much usage. I prefer to have a good 3G unlimited connection than 5GB at 4G speeds. Same thing for 5G. If we cannot have unlimited (or close to unlimited) data then new usage cannot really be developed. Edit : typos.
- neuronic 8y ago
  There isn't such a country. 2018 has seen a number of field tests for 5G, for example at the Hamburg Port in Germany.
- mrweasel 8y ago
  >I don't really understand the author point if there is nowhere I can access this tech. It's that his point? Others complain that Apple doesn't have a 5G iPhone ready. Part of Cringelys point is that it doesn't make sense to penalize Apple for the lack of 5G support, when there's no infrastructure available.
- kisstheblade 8y ago
  Well in Finland you can (eg. Elisa has opened the first 5g networks already). Only the client hardware is missing now :) And we are "soon" moving to 6G anyhow, maybe I'll skip 5G :) https://www.oulu.fi/6gflagship/ https://www.oulu.fi/6gflagship/
pjc50 8y ago
> All networking will be wireless and truck rolls will end forever. No more cable guy. People have been saying this for years, but I'm not yet convinced; I don't hear too many people giving up wired for 4G. The overall download limits must surely be tighter? What 5G might solve is cell congestion. There are already places in central Edinburgh where I can have full "bars" and no bandwidth, because it's too heavily contended with the other thousand people in the same cell now that everyone has a phone that's polling all the time.
thatguyagain 8y ago
People are talking about 5G from a consumer perspective here, which is fine, but I'm pretty sure the real benefits will first be seen in industrial manufacturing and autonomous vehicles. Perhaps gaming as well. The latency is a big factor. So yes, you can already watch netflix on your phone, but not every technological step forward is about your individual entertainment :) For reference, just look at what Ericsson is doing: https://www.ericsson.com/en/5g/what-is-5g https://www.ericsson.com/en/5g/what-is-5g
- usermac 8y ago
  Thank you. That was the clearest video explanation I could have asked for.
  - thatguyagain 8y ago
    Maybe you saw it, but there's a video below the first one on that page which I think illustrates the latency difference pretty good too!
saisanthosh 8y ago
There need not be any limit. The eye can pick up a of a single photon in the right context. It doesn't get any briefer than that.
srikanthkalin 8y ago
Just to get this out of the way, I see Apple shares currently presenting a huge buying opportunity. A good Christmas quarter will regain that lost 20 percent, and I don’t see any reason why Apple shouldn’t have a good Christmas quarter.
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
> Much of this spectrum has been bought-back by wireless carriers from TV license holders. We’ll see this trend continue over the next decade or so until there will be no over-the-air TV left at all. At that point you’ll still be able to watch all the same TV, but it will be over 5G, instead. Now this is interesting. I wonder if this means the rural and the poor will have to give up on free[0] television. [0] Ad supported. Edit: Not trying to imply only the rural and poor enjoy free tv. Cord cutters do too. My concern is that they won't be able to afford the new alternative or it just won't be available.
kevin_b_er 8y ago
None of the supposed speed improvements matter in the US due to widespread usage caps and throttling. Latency? That sounds nifty for something like video confrencing. Alas, the bandwidth caps are there anyways. Faster speed just means a random website can burn through your Verizon cap that much faster. "Unlimited" has and is a willful lie and deception by wireless companies. The fine print always says the opposite.

112 points by evo_9 8y ago

tlrobinson 8y ago

(2018)

skilled 8y ago
It's over. What about it?
- X-Istence 8y ago
  This article was posted November 21st, 2018. The grandparent was simply noting that the article should be tagged with the year because it is no longer current.
- NullPrefix 8y ago
  Articles from previous years are postfixed with (year)
  - skilled 8y ago
    That's the joke...

mr_toad 8y ago

> But sometimes writers looking for a story don’t fully understand what they are talking about Or they’re just talking about what their audience wants to hear. Without actually making a story up. Usually.

jimtaguchi 8y ago

Just to get this out of the way, I see Apple shares currently presenting a huge buying opportunity. A good Christmas quarter will regain that lost 20 percent, and I don’t see any reason why Apple shouldn’t have a good Christmas quarter. Yikes...

drumhead 8y ago
Yes, that comment was a not well timed at all.
- jeklj 8y ago
  Prognostication has never been Cringely’s strong suit.
- winrid 8y ago
  It really was. Impressive.
- ianai 8y ago
  Prediction is at best a fools game. I wish people were more forgiving. Just, of course, be extra careful when predictions involve your money.
  - rictic 8y ago
    If predictors state their confidence and make falsifiable predictions then they can be fairly graded and compared. This is especially true when many other people are also making predictions about the same event. Cringely is the stereotype of the pundit who makes a lot of really confident predictions that are just absurdly, comically wrong, over and over and over. But he's fun to read, so he gets read. Same as the analysts that you see on the news.
    - beatgammit 8y ago
      I love watching Jim Cramer, but I never take his stock picks. I like his analysis and use it as a representation of the majority of household investors looking at the short term. I find that entertaining, and I like watching the movement of stocks after his analysis. However, when I make my own investments, I do more thorough that watching a guy make quick-fire guesses.
ununoctium87 8y ago
That remark aged really well...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

skunkworker 8y ago

For me personally the jump from 4g(LTE) to 5G is much less apparent than from 3G to 4G. It's not unlike the upgrades in video technology. 2G -> 3G -> 4G -> 5G VHS -> DVD -> Bluray -> UHD While the jump is significant between each level, the apparent improvements are diminishing. On LTE I can watch Netflix, live tv, Facetime, use the internet as I would at home on Wifi. Using the internet on the go (mobile) won't see that much of an apparent improvement (unless you are needing high bandwidth connectivity), but I could definitely see a case if this was used to push gigabit level wireless speeds in hard to install/dense residential locations.

DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
I think the biggest change won’t be the faster speeds that 5G will deliver; but that it will necessarily mean the carriers will have to significantly raise their bandwidth limits beyond the current 1-10GB/mo limits (even “Unlimited” plans have soft caps and speed limits). Kinda like how 3G meant iMessage, Skype and Hangouts rendered SMS obsolete so carriers stopped charging per-message - I think 5G will mean more people will stream other video streaming services (this skirting the controversy over zero-rating Netflix and YouTube to the detriment of their competitors). Hopefully this will also mean that people in underserved rural areas stuck on atrociously slow DSL can get decent service without needing to compromise with a high-latency satellite connection or a low-transfer-limit LTE hotspot.
- perlpimp 8y ago
  Herein lies the question, if we actually prefer to text instead of vid/facetime/etc how this would be relevant. Streaming applications from powerful server might be a thing though.
londons_explore 8y ago
Live streaming apps from the cloud rather than running them locally on the device suddenly becomes practical when you have reliable low latency connections. That in turn means apps can be faster because they're running on a cluster of powerful machines with a big GPU. Developers will look back at the old times when apps had to be unloaded to save memory, and then try to recover state when reopened.

desireco42 8y ago

Apple doesn't know sh*t lately. Projecting expertise and mystical knowledge worked when Steve Jobs were there, even if you were wrong, at least this guy had great vision in front of him, so it made sense to assume he sees more and better. Today, that is no longer the case. 5G has quite a few hurdles ahead of them, it is already overhyped and it might not deliver.

zapzupnz 8y ago
Could you elaborate on your comment? I don't see how your assertion about Jobs (which I personally find tiresome: he's been dead a long while but the company continues to thrive; it's now necessary to start qualifying this argument about Jobs' absence rather than assume it is the argument) ties in with the details of the article. Perhaps you could expand on what you see as 5G's hurdles and how they specifically relate to Apple's product plans.
- wkearney99 8y ago
  Is it really 'thriving if it's just operating by feeding off the carcass of what Jobs forced into existence or only trivially evolving it? Innovation and bringing that to market has been sorely lacking from apple of late.
  - prewett 8y ago
    If by "not innovating" you mean "not introducing new product-categories" then, yes, Apple isn't innovating. However, in the past few years Apple has: - made fingerprint scanning fast and easy to use (and then removed it) - pioneered facial recognition that is robust against being fooled by images and masks, and also robust to the user's face slowly changing (e.g. growing a beard) - created their own SoC that allows for solid security, excellent power management, and fast graphics - made security a feature - pioneered augmented reality with ARKit - pioneered watch-based EKG - pioneered watch-based insulin measurements (apparently the research didn't work out, though) - researching self-driving cars (rumor has it) - pioneered fake bokeh with a phone camera - maintains net profit margins of 40% (!! even Coca-Cola is only around 30%; margins of this sort are not easy to maintain for multiple years) You could argue that Apple is not the first to do many of those, but it wasn't the first to make a phone-computer, nor was it the first to make watch-computer, yet that counted as innovating. So I don't think it would be fair to say that security, SoC, AR, self-driving cars (allegedly) is not innovating. It's just that the innovations aren't category-defining like they used to be. But category-defining innovations aren't a dime a dozen. And we don't know if Steve Jobs could have continued creating category-defining products, either.

chowells 8y ago

Wow. There's some truth in there, but a lot of nonsense. Especially in the analogies. If you can't see the difference between 60Hz and 144Hz when a small object (mouse pointer) is moving quickly against a static background, you're not paying attention. And 144Hz is amazingly far short of the actual perceptual limit in that case. Consider the difference between what it looks like to move your fingertip around and move a mouse pointer around at high speed. I haven't done tests to measure, but I'd be surprised if I mistook a 500Hz sampling rate for continuous movement. This is all because there are edge cases for which your brain can make use of significantly more information than it can directly identify. Just because a pixel has a smaller arc than your retina can distinguish doesn't mean that its contribution to the image isn't recognized. "Retina" screens are still far below the level at which there would stop being advantages to increasing resolution. (Yes, there would be huge disadvantages too, and I'm not saying we need higher resolutions.) What are the odds that there are edge cases where the extra bandwidth of 5G would actually matter? Seems pretty close to 100% to me. Some of those edge cases might be as easy to find as moving your mouse pointer rapidly. Maybe going to a sporting event?

snazz 8y ago
I do wonder what the limit is in visual “framerate”. Normal light seems very smooth, but I can easily pick up on individual “frames” if I wave my finger under an older fluorescent light (which should be running at 50-60Hz to match mains power if I understand it correctly).
- baroffoos 8y ago
  The eyes don't have a framerate. A video at 60fps looks smooth but a single black frame on a white video is visible even at much higher fps. If I move my mouse quickly in circles on a 60fpx screen it looks like I have 10 individual cursors in a ring but if I move my finger quickly in circles it looks like I have a slightly transparent ring shaped finger with no gaps in between, I can see the smooth curve of the path that my finger took which would have to be captured at an incredibly high framerate to display on a monitor.
  - 8y ago

hellofunk 8y ago

I read an article a couple of months ago where numerous scientists signed a letter proclaiming significant health risks to ubiquitous 5G in society, that the waves are apparently quite dangerous to health? Anyone know anything about that? I think this was it: https://www.saferemr.com/2017/09/5G-moratorium12.html https://www.saferemr.com/2017/09/5G-moratorium12.html

zw123456 8y ago
One of the primary premises of cellular technology is Frequency re-use (time division is as well, combined called OFDMA) but just in terms of Freq re-use, if you want to increase the capacity of a cellular system then you want to reduce the size of a cell site. The way this is done is by reducing the power level (also lowering the elevation of antennas). When you reduce the power level then adjacent cell sites can re-use the same frequencies without interfering with each other. When people hear about 5G where plans call for 300 meter cell spacing, they panic thinking that the power levels will increase, but in reality it does not. Because the transmitter power levels are reduced commensurately. A lot of people (even scientists) do not understand this basic concept. Current spacing and power levels are 2Km at 40Watts (typical but varies) in an urban area for low and mid band (1ghz - 3ghz). If you reduce the spacing to 300M and 5W, then you really have not changed the energy density. But what you accomplish is getting more capacity by enabling more re-use of frequency spectrum. The numbers are different for different bands due to different propagation properties, but that is the basic concept.
- hellofunk 8y ago
  I was referring to this: https://www.saferemr.com/2017/09/5G-moratorium12.html https://www.saferemr.com/2017/09/5G-moratorium12.html The concerns seemed legit, I wonder why the industry is either not paying attention to them, or not at least responding to the concerns
  - Junk_Collector 8y ago
    People respond to these concerns constantly. This was the same group against, 2G, 3G, 4G, wireless power meters, etc. In fact, The response from the DIRECTORATE-GENERAL HEALTH AND FOOD SAFETY of the European Union was linked on the site. Of course, the SaferEMR folks dismiss it and all of the safety testing and health risk studies that have been done. Their official stance is that we haven't demonstrated that there couldn't be some unknown mechanism by which EMR could negatively impact human health so we should curtail all wireless technology until we have proven that there is no possible down side. This is of course impossible.

United857 8y ago

The author isn't thinking ahead enough. We might be reaching human perceptual limits for rectilinear 2-D displays -- but what about stereoscopic, 360, lightfields, ...? There's plenty of future formats for content that will drive bandwidth and resolution improvements for a long time to come.

MrKristopher 8y ago
That all comes out in 2019?
- baroffoos 8y ago
  VR has been out for ages and is fairly limited by the current available tech.
- stuntkite 8y ago
  I have a streaming volumetric video chat prototype. I plan on launching private beta this month. I also have a portable hardware display that I guess you could call a phone that I'm working on. I expect it to be testing with a small group by Q2. I'm petty excited about 2019. 5G makes things a lot easier and really increases how people can interact with the content. Just for reference, streaming point cloud is about 100mb/sec. You can compress "frames" with the totally unproven Google Draco product, but there's nothing quite like mpeg for the format. I guess it's really hard to call it a format since there's no real standard at current.

Nokinside 8y ago

5G home routers will come before first. It's seems that the plan is to get early adopters to replace cable. https://www.verizonwireless.com/5g/home/ https://www.verizonwireless.com/5g/home/

baroffoos 8y ago
I can see it happening in Australia where the internet is universally shit unless you are in the lucky 1% of areas. My office is in the center of the city and has 10Mbit/s down. We would easily be in range of any future 5g infrastructure.

becauseiam 8y ago

Maybe I am biased, but live TV is not going to die completely. News, sport, concerts, lotto results, and other timely things will continue to have demand. IP is a terribly broken and inefficient medium to deliver this to the audience, and the internet as it stands today with what we deliver simply does not have the capacity to survive a "traditional TV switch off". Some broadcasters are testing with deploying onto 5G with various trials, but most appear to be doing an all IP operation, and handing over the controls of deployment from the incumbent transmission networks who charge on site/power and other performance metrics, to telcos who will probably charge both the broadcaster and the end user per packet, as well as introducing more middlemen (CDNs) to further create inefficiencies. There's a lot to work out before Cringely's "utopian" 5G network to rule them all can actually exist.

bdhess 8y ago
TV delivered over IP is not the same as TV delivered over the internet. When your ISP is the same entity as your TV carrier, the traffic doesn't have to travel over the internet. Comcast is already doing this with X1 and Verizon is already doing this with Fios.
- topranks 8y ago
  Yeah exactly. Lots of cable TV networks are all-IP, using multicast to distribute the signal. But the previous post is 100% correct in saying that “video over unicast on the internet” is massively inefficient compared to current broadcast techniques. People want Netflix-style video on demand though. Outside live news & sports that will kill broadcast TV.
  - londons_explore 8y ago
    What seems 'horribly inefficient' today is usually the future. Sending cartoons as raster rather than vector data is also horribly inefficient, yet every TV network does it. Sending music as MP3 is horribly inefficient compared to the original notes in midi form, yet everyone does it. Taking a photograph of your electric meter rather than writing down the number is millions of times more wasteful of space, yet people do it.

gumby 8y ago

What a strange article. The real issue is that 5G in 24–86 GH region has a range of about 1500 m, unlike LTE (and 5G in the LTE bands up to 6 GH) with a much longer range. So think of 5G more as a small-cell mesh technology -- I doubt you'll see it outside urban centers except for marketing -- your "5G" phone will continue to work but only at LTE speeds & bandwidth.

ianai 8y ago
Too bad, I was hoping the mesh would mean more bandwidth more places - as the mesh allows much greater signal.
1stranger 8y ago
It's my understanding that 5G will also be used in the 600mhz spectrum at least by T-Mobile so will have the longer range with improved bandwidth and latency of 5G.
- gumby 8y ago
  I’m afraid at the lower frequencies you’re not going to see much improvement due to the laws of physics.

z3t4 8y ago

i remember a call from someone trying to sell me 3G internet. she had a very hard time understanding why the bandwidth they offered wasn't enough, i already had a fiber connection. its nice to only have to wait a second when downloading packages using apt-get, downloading free OS distributions, container images, training sets, software modules and dependencies, raw images, backups, installing a game from Steam, etc.

niftich 8y ago

I'm not familiar with the author but I agree with their first few points. But I feel there's more to it than that. Apple can afford to hold off on 5G because the networks aren't there, the "5G" term as an industry-sanctioned umbrella for related innovations is firmly in the hype-phase of the hype cycle and its various features are intentionally and unintentionally conflated (both at the origin by industry and along the way by writers and pundits in media), and because Apple is an integrated hardware-software platform distinct from the only other mobile alternative, and is therefore more resilient against a hypothetical consumer exodus over not supporting something no one can yet use anyway. Unlike consumers, some investors may see it differently, but Apple isn't in dire financial straits either. As for use-cases that 5G will enable, industry groups are hopeful for nearly every scenario that involves sending and receiving data. But technical fitness and business models are different questions entirely. And if we're talking about the kinds of hardware Apple currently makes, 5G is to be understood solely in terms of wireless carriers a customer can subscribe to a plan for, not in some intricate use-case for machine-to-machine communication. Unlike a more invested party and component-maker like Qualcomm, Huawei Nokia, or Samsung, their customer base isn't industry at large, but people who want a tablet-like device to carry with them. They can punt this to the next generation of phones or the one after that, they can wait out the network to be built, for the insane number of access points to be deployed, and perhaps even until their feud with Qualcomm winds down, and the state of play (solely in terms of mobile data and its utility for a smartphone) isn't going to be running circles around them for a while.

GuB-42 8y ago

No excuses to Apple. First, 5G is the future, it may not be important at first but it will eventually change. Is a bit of future proofing too much to ask of a high end smartphone? Second, 5G is not just about maximum bandwidth, it also gives you access to less saturated frequencies. The lack of 5G is a very big deal, especially when smartphones vendors struggle to find even minor differentiating factors.

FPGAhacker 8y ago
I agree about future-proofing a phone from the consumer point of view, but it would decrease Apple's margins or increase the price of an already really expensive phone for no current benefit. On the technical side, I think 5G has a serious problem of being blocked by just about anything at those frequencies. I'm sure the RF wizards will get it sorted out, but I imagine early adopters are going to suffer with garbage signal indoors.
- niftich 8y ago
  More on this: upcoming 5G implementation proposals, such as 3GPP's '5G NR', have bands [1] in the UHF, SHF, and EHF range, out of which the EHF/mmWave bands are most susceptible to environmental attenuation, but they're also the ones capable of the highest throughput. The UHF bands are rather similar to LTE, and deliver only a modest improvement. So really, 5G is a somewhat abstract standard by ITU-T that specifies requirements, and the industry then delivers a suite of technologies that are deployed together and marketed as 5G. In the case of 4G, the same was true at first, but then non-confirming LTE was cobbled together as a series of progressive enhancements of existing tech by the industry, and marketed as "4G", co-opting the term in consumers' minds and making the prior formal definition irrelevant. With the hype and anticipation over 5G rapidly intensifying, there's a chance the same might happen again, as networks are eager to brand any progressive enhancement as a true differentiating factor. It's enabled by the term "5G" having cachet with consumers, yet its technical specs are relatively obscure so average customers lack meaningful information and recourse to challenge the marketing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_NR_frequency_bands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_NR_frequency_bands
8y ago

jsgo 8y ago

...because this story presumes that 5G support is somehow vital to mobile phones. It isn’t. ... But the important question to ask here is why that speed difference matters for mobile phone users? It doesn’t. 5G is no killer app. ———- Stopped reading at this point. 1) based on quotes from various providers, one big benefit of 5G is in bandwidth. I don’t personally know how (beyond less time to download something opens up bandwidth for other devices quicker), but that’d seem to be a big deal. The whole network saturation issues I hear about (T-Mobile is great in my area and I’ve never experienced throttling issues or the like, but I’ve heard stories). 2) What other killer feature can a phone have at this point? I’ll give credit to phones that flip out into tablet like displays, but I think just about any truly compelling innovation is pretty done in these devices. 3) Anecdote time. I live in a neighborhood where we spent 5 years fighting a provider that maintained an exclusive easement over TV/Internet. This provider’s speed was 10Mbps on a great day and their peak hours were, per their support staff, “between 4pm and 1am” where you were lucky to get Facebook to load (and people sharing pictures/video which seems to be the big use case was a painful experience to be on the receiving end of). Finally, we got out of it and while waiting for Spectrum to lay their infrastructure, I was using T-Mobile’s International Plus add-on as a hotspot for desktop, laptop and TVs and it was fantastic (relative to what we had). Mobile LTE/5G could very easily serve those in similar situations and if infrastructure is in place, rural areas. I’m of the mind that I won’t buy a 5G device until the infrastructure is there so I’m okay with what I read to a point, but it seemed like a case of making a myriad excuses after a point and tired of it quickly.

dingo_bat 8y ago
> I’m of the mind that I won’t buy a 5G device until the infrastructure is there so I’m okay with what I read to a point If you want any other innovation (camera, screen, cpu, etc.), you will be forced by Apple to pay for 5G tech too.

signa11 8y ago

fta ''' The whole idea behind 5G is that it will allow the wireless carriers to totally eat the lunches of wireline telephone, cable and Internet service providers while also supplanting broadcast TV. ''' well, most of the wireline operators have a _huge_ presence in the wireless world as well, think at&t, vzw, sprint, vodafone etc. of the world. afaik, 5g has primarily been about better specturm utilization. core-network has not really changed significantly since 3g -> 4g transition (where it i.e. core, became an all ip network). sure, you keep hearing about things like control-plane user-plane separation (cups) etc. but that is just a marginal improvement over what has already been deployed/running...

camillomiller 8y ago

“Just to get this out of the way, I see Apple shares currently presenting a huge buying opportunity. A good Christmas quarter will regain that lost 20 percent, and I don’t see any reason why Apple shouldn’t have a good Christmas quarter.” Ouch

3chelon 8y ago
My exact thought.

joecool1029 8y ago

I'm still looking for whitepapers on 5G. Has a standard even come together yet, or are we mostly just talking about high-band spectrum use that will be stopped by leaves? The carriers are just going to push a software update to change the indicator for LTE-A to 5G, I think AT&T already did that...

londons_explore 8y ago
Current tech can't really smoothly move between frequency bands. 5G is promising that. If 90 percent of the phones in a cell can be hoisted up to the 80Ghz spectrum, then the remaining devices can each have a much larger share of the 800Mhz/1.8Ghz spectrum. As the leaves blow about in the wind, devices will dynamically shift bands every few milliseconds.
Frqy3 8y ago
Nokia Networks has some good 5G whitepapers and other learning resources. https://networks.nokia.com/5g/resources https://networks.nokia.com/5g/resources
- joecool1029 8y ago
  Thanks!
Foivos 8y ago
A big part of 5G are deployments at sub-6Ghz frequencies. So for this part, you do not have to worry about 5G being short range or easily blocked. Compared to LTE you will still get benefits like flexible numerology (ie. lower latency) and full duplex (ie. increased bandwidth). The name 5G is more of a marketing term rather than an accurate technical description, just like the term "retina display". Different vendors can market the same technology very differently. For example, HSPA was marketed as 3.5G, 3G+, Turbo 3G, 3.7G, 3.9G and even 4G. It did not help that HSPA evolved a bit during its lifetime. I would not be surprised if operators arbitrary decide to call whatever they are using 5G.
- opencl 8y ago

ninedays 8y ago

Can anyone tell me in which country I can use 5G network as a regular consumer? I don't really understand the author point if there is nowhere I can access this tech. Also, having a 5G network with lots of restriction won't bring much usage. I prefer to have a good 3G unlimited connection than 5GB at 4G speeds. Same thing for 5G. If we cannot have unlimited (or close to unlimited) data then new usage cannot really be developed. Edit : typos.

neuronic 8y ago
There isn't such a country. 2018 has seen a number of field tests for 5G, for example at the Hamburg Port in Germany.
mrweasel 8y ago
>I don't really understand the author point if there is nowhere I can access this tech. It's that his point? Others complain that Apple doesn't have a 5G iPhone ready. Part of Cringelys point is that it doesn't make sense to penalize Apple for the lack of 5G support, when there's no infrastructure available.
kisstheblade 8y ago
Well in Finland you can (eg. Elisa has opened the first 5g networks already). Only the client hardware is missing now :) And we are "soon" moving to 6G anyhow, maybe I'll skip 5G :) https://www.oulu.fi/6gflagship/ https://www.oulu.fi/6gflagship/

pjc50 8y ago

> All networking will be wireless and truck rolls will end forever. No more cable guy. People have been saying this for years, but I'm not yet convinced; I don't hear too many people giving up wired for 4G. The overall download limits must surely be tighter? What 5G might solve is cell congestion. There are already places in central Edinburgh where I can have full "bars" and no bandwidth, because it's too heavily contended with the other thousand people in the same cell now that everyone has a phone that's polling all the time.

thatguyagain 8y ago

People are talking about 5G from a consumer perspective here, which is fine, but I'm pretty sure the real benefits will first be seen in industrial manufacturing and autonomous vehicles. Perhaps gaming as well. The latency is a big factor. So yes, you can already watch netflix on your phone, but not every technological step forward is about your individual entertainment :) For reference, just look at what Ericsson is doing: https://www.ericsson.com/en/5g/what-is-5g https://www.ericsson.com/en/5g/what-is-5g

usermac 8y ago
Thank you. That was the clearest video explanation I could have asked for.
- thatguyagain 8y ago
  Maybe you saw it, but there's a video below the first one on that page which I think illustrates the latency difference pretty good too!

saisanthosh 8y ago

There need not be any limit. The eye can pick up a of a single photon in the right context. It doesn't get any briefer than that.

srikanthkalin 8y ago

JustSomeNobody 8y ago

> Much of this spectrum has been bought-back by wireless carriers from TV license holders. We’ll see this trend continue over the next decade or so until there will be no over-the-air TV left at all. At that point you’ll still be able to watch all the same TV, but it will be over 5G, instead. Now this is interesting. I wonder if this means the rural and the poor will have to give up on free[0] television. [0] Ad supported. Edit: Not trying to imply only the rural and poor enjoy free tv. Cord cutters do too. My concern is that they won't be able to afford the new alternative or it just won't be available.

kevin_b_er 8y ago

None of the supposed speed improvements matter in the US due to widespread usage caps and throttling. Latency? That sounds nifty for something like video confrencing. Alas, the bandwidth caps are there anyways. Faster speed just means a random website can burn through your Verizon cap that much faster. "Unlimited" has and is a willful lie and deception by wireless companies. The fine print always says the opposite.